Our flawed system

Senior accounting and finance major

It’s a very difficult time to be an American voter. There are already plenty of laws aimed at making voting more difficult, from limits on early voting to voter ID requirements and absentee ballot rules, to name a few. Many states have established voting district boundaries that minimize the likelihood of incumbents losing — Slate has a great puzzle on its website showing how absurd these have become. And in the age of the 24-hour media cycle, it’s becoming clear just how ridiculous some of our most visible politicians are (see: Akin, Todd). On top of all these, though, is the rise of the third party, and the damage it does to our ability to make our voices heard.

Under our constitutional system, a candidate is elected president when he or she receives more than 50 percent of the electoral votes in the country. If no one receives more than 50 percent of the electoral votes, no one wins. But instead of having a revote or a runoff, like many other countries would, we would just send the top three candidates to Congress. Then, in a very strange procedure detailed in the 12th Amendment, each of the states’ delegations to the House of Representatives gets one vote, and the candidate who earns a majority of these votes becomes president.

With the rise of the third party, this scenario could very easily happen. For example, if the tea party split from the Republican Party and the Democrats were to offer up a truly awful candidate, we could end up with an electorate fairly evenly split three ways. But in that situation, the tea party candidate would lose every time — the largest party in Congress at that point, the Democrats, would either persuade some Republicans to hop over or choose to back the likely more moderate Republican candidate. All of those tea party voters who asserted themselves by choosing someone different would ultimately end up with nothing to show for their efforts.

While in theory these third parties offer a chance for people to break away from the Republican-Democrat binary, in practice they end up causing one of those parties to win — usually the party more directly opposed to the third party’s views. This will continue to be the case as long as the Constitution stays the way it is.

The only solutions, then, are either to change the Constitution or work around it. Some states have tried the latter by supporting the national popular vote, in which every state would send all of its electoral votes to whichever candidate wins the overall popular vote in the country, bypassing the electoral system entirely. But there is another option, in which we move to a parliamentary system like those found in many other democratic countries.

Under these systems, majority parties are often built on the consensuses of groups of smaller parties. Though this system has any number of issues, it at least allows people to vote for the candidates they actually want — and when, as of now, political parties send forward candidates we don’t want, voters can just replace them. Instead of the parties having power over the voters, the voters will have power over the parties.

Neither of these solutions will happen in the near future — the national popular vote is still 134 electoral votes short of working and constitutional amendments take years — but under the current system, third parties can’t really work. Until then, a vote for a third party candidate is not only a wasted vote, but sometimes even a vote for the opposing party.